Category Archives: Lent

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written,

‘Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.’”

Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

Matthew 4:10-11

You can have it all. Really, you can. Someone on a commercial just told me.

The tragedy is that we believe it. We strive for it. Envy burns within as our coworker gets the promotion, our siblings gets the boat, our neighbor gets the in-ground pool. We are always looking for fulfillment on the outside, aren’t we?

Jesus heard the words, too. You can have it all! And don’t think for a moment he didn’t pause. Let us not forget that Jesus was fully human. Jesus was not at all immune to the twinge of envy, the surge of lust, the enticement of you-can-have-it-all. Shortly before his crucifixion, he’d even agonize over his vocation: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me” (Matthew 26:39).

Perhaps, Jesus even thought to himself, “I’ve heard this story before.” Surging into his memory comes the recollection of a day when, gathered with other Jewish boys, he hears the original temptation story of Genesis 3 told. Images of the slithering snake, the promise of power and knowledge, and the sting of shame flood his mind. You, Jesus, can have it all.

Consider this, too. Not only is Jesus fully human, but Jesus is also fully God. He was present at creation, in creation. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. I’m speculating here, but maybe something of his own original, Trinitarian imagination surged within the moment. Could it be that Jesus recalled the original simplicity and beauty of Eden, capturing it in words familiar to any Jew of that day:

‘Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.’”

Maybe in that one crucial moment, Jesus remembered. Maybe in the midst of the you can have it all whisper, Jesus recalled – Worship the Lord and serve only him. Maybe he remembered his origins. Maybe he remembered his birthright. Maybe he remembered that humanity is born of more simple things – earth, soil, humility.

That’s it, isn’t it? You see, if God is God, then you don’t have to be. You can give up your relentless, exhausting attempt to be more than you are – richer, sexier, stronger. You can remember that “everything I have is already yours.” You don’t need anything more. God is God, you’re not, and that’s that. You can remember. You can receive. You can rest, returning the humble ground of your being.

The words Jesus found in that moment were familiar ones, repeated often in his Scriptures – Deuteronomy, 1 Samuel, Isaiah, and in many other paraphrases. They are a call to remember. It was a way of saying, “Let’s get back to the basics – to who I am, who you are, to who we are together.” Worship is not some demand of a narcissistic God, but an invitation to be re-oriented rightly, to return to the ground of our beings, to accept the gift of the dust. Worship is the great return to our depths.

It’s hard to remember. That’s why we need Lent. In the midst of a world that says, “You can have it all,” Jesus reminds us that we already do. We need not attain it. We need not achieve it. We, more often than not, simply fall into it.

__________

Prayer:

Jesus, it’s hard to imagine resisting that “you can have it all” voice as you did. The security you had in being God’s beloved is remarkable. I long for this, too. In my head, I can believe that I have it all in you, but it’s a much harder journey to live it. Will you whisper it to me regularly, by your Spirit? Amen

She sends an email to me with an anxious energy to it. In it, she writes, “Seriously, I’ve not given any thought to Lent this year, and I’m not sure what I should give up.”

“Why don’t you give up being so anxious?” I say. She isn’t amused. We know each other well enough for the banter, but my response also touches a deeper pain within her.

“I haven’t known a day without anxiety for years,” she says. “At least Lent gives me some control over it. I can give up chocolate or social media and feel a little better about myself.”

Hmmm.

Later I call her and check in further. Every year, the anxiety ramps up around this time, she tells me. New Year commitments to diet and exercise have faded. Lent seems like the perfect opportunity to recommit. I sense her weariness. I want to be sensitive, and yet I’m mad. I’m mad at Lenten diets. I’m mad at liturgical pragmatism. I’m mad not at her, but for her. I know her story – the expectations she lives with, the buzzing anxiety that covers a brutal shame about her appearance and her obedience.

15 Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; 16 but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

The message of Transfiguration Sunday is that the Spirit reveals you as glorious, I tell her.

You.

Are.

Glorious.

Theology has conspired with family-of-origin issues in her life in a way that she’s convinced she’s despicable, that as her pastor says, “God cannot look upon you in your sin so God looks at Jesus.”

I wince.

“No, you are glorious.”

“But Lent tells me I’m dirt,” she says.

Hmmm.

I tell her about Lent. Lent (Lencthen) is a season of lengthening, of springtime hope, of new birth. The seed that falls to the ground bears fruit, I say. I ask her if she plans to go to Ash Wednesday services, and she says yes. I tell her that the imposition of ashes is a glorious thing – an invitation to return to the dust. No more anxious striving. No more cheap “enoughness” substitutes. It’s not about giving up chocolate, but giving up striving. Returning to the ground, the humus…a place of rest, humility, simply being.

“I’m so tired,” she says.

“I know.”

I share a quote from Rabbi Bunim: Keep two pieces of paper in your pocket at all times. One that says, “I am a speck of dust.” And another that says, “The world was made for me.”

“That’s beautiful,” she says. “I needed that.”

Dust and dignity.

Limitation and Love.

“Maybe I am gloriously ordinary and God loves me in that,” she says.

I call it “liturgical therapy,” I say.

Wiser people than me chose to place Transfiguration Sunday right before Ash Wednesday.

Moses ascended into the thin place where heaven meets earth, a place called Sinai. And he radiated the glory.

Jesus ascended the mount followed by his disciples. And he was transfigured before them.

But now you and I are the thin place, the place where heaven meets earth. The Spirit dwells in us, God’s temples.

And we are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.

David Tracy, a Roman Catholic theologian, has said, “There is never an authentic disclosure of truth which is not also transformative.” What he means, at least in part, is that the Christian claim on ‘truth’ is hollow if it remains a doctrinal claim apart from a lived experience of transformed lives. And, of course, Jesus places a big exclamation point on this when he calls himself “the way, the truth, the life.” Indicting the religious experts, he shows truth by embodying the pascal mystery, by becoming our Passover, by descending into hell to release us from our own hellish prisons.

As the sun descends beneath the horizon and darkness falls upon the earth, millions of Christians all over the world are celebrating the dawn. Darkness is required for a dawn. You cannot have authentic faith without a darkness. The mystery of the faith is precisely this – that we must walk in the cruciform way of the suffering Savior. Christianity is, in the end, no happy-clappy, wealth and health social club. It is about a transformed community, imaging the Son, walking the pascal way, dying and rising, resisting the violent-coercive-imperialistic way of consumerist culture, and most likely paying the price for it. Humiliation is not an option – it’s an inevitability.

But the breaking dawn invites us to see that all is not doom and gloom. From darkness, the impossible is realized. With the disciples of Jesus scattered to the four winds, afraid to embrace a faith that might require their participation as those transformed by truth, Jesus emerges to a world that must now reckon with a very new reality. This new reality is that wars are not won and lost by power, intimidation, competition, or violence. The real battle is won through self-surrender, humiliation, turning the other cheek, loving and blessing and forgiving our neighbor.

If only that might become the politics that informs this election season.

Real faith requires more than intellectual assent. It invites participation in that downwardly mobile, self-sacrificial, humiliating way of the Cross. Jesus does not save us from suffering. He saves us from ourselves, which engages us in a process of intense suffering, as every part of us that resists God is chipped and stripped away. And he calls us into the path of blessing and forgiving others. It’s so hard, because its so counter-intuitive. We’d rather live out of our old reptilian brain, our evolutionary hangover, which pits us against others, which defines others as enemies, which demonizes and uses and manipulates. God knows I am fighting this very battle every day. And but for the suffering servanthood of Jesus, I’d be well on my way to living an vacuous Easter faith that does not require Good Friday suffering. I’d have written my own version of the story – only victory, success, fame…no participation, humiliation, risk, vulnerability, suffering.

And so on the heels of Easter, we can only say, “He is risen” because he first suffered and died. And we can only experience our own risenness through the same. Faithfulness isn’t some life of legalistic and moralistic perfectionism. It is, instead, a dying and rising with One who paved the highway through the desert for us. The dawn is breaking. Are we on that highway, or have we paved our own more convenient way?

It’s our human tendency to want to know. The serpent, long ago, offered knowledge of good and evil. And ever since, we’ve been judging who’s in and who’s out, who gets it and who doesn’t, who believes the right things and who doesn’t.

It’s fascinating, then, that the way Jesus restores relationship is by paradox. He does not offer the right answer. Instead, he lives it. He embodies it. And, it’s called “scandal,” “foolishness,” and “folly.” He enters into the darkness, through the portal of suffering and death. His life ends on a different kind of tree – not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – but one which would need to die in order to sprout again, only to grow in the hearts of men and women who could bear its death in their own bodies so to offer its best fruit.

A seminary professor once said, “I went to seminary to learn about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, only to later see that I was devouring its fruit the entire time.” We crave knowledge, control, certitude. It is the appetite of the false self, the “ego” as many psychologists have called it. But the paradox of Good Friday is that life comes through death, that wisdom comes through the embrace of the paradox, that fruitfulness in our lives emerges as we die, again and again, to our ego.

Good Friday is not a day where we merely remember, though remembering is vital. Rather, we participate, because it is in dying that we live. We can only love, serve, risk, and become the mission-shaped people we’re called to be as we succumb to this inevitability. It may take a thousand humiliations to make a significant dent in that hell-bent ego. But death will come, whether we surrender to it or not. And through the darkness, we will discover real illumination, the kind of freedom that manifests in a flourishing life.

“To love is to care, to care is to give ourselves, and giving ourselves means being willing to hurt. In love we fall from our pride, from our sense of mastery and separateness, from whatever towers of false safety we have constructed for ourselves. We fall into wonder and wakefulness, joy and agony. Then comes the difficult part: we must try to live according to our desire in the moment-to-moment experiences of our lives. The way of love invites us to become vessels of love, sharers in grace rather than controllers of achievement. It asks for vulnerability rather than self-protection, willingness instead of mastery. It beckons us toward participation in the great unfolding of creation, toward becoming one with it rather than standing apart and trying to overcome it.” Gerald May, The Awakened Heart

I remember being very suspicious in my first seminary Psychology course. I was told the psychologists know nothing of theology or the Bible, and only lead one down the path of secular humanism and self-reliance. It took learning that John Calvin was steeped in the humanism of his day for me to gain a bit of courage to read outside the box. Paradoxically, my own therapy and study of psychology has led to a greater awareness of the depth of sin and struggle within us all. Consider the great 20th century psychoanalyst Carl Jung:

“We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women who pass by without exciting attention, and who betray to the world nothing of the conflicts that rage within them except possibly by a nervous breakdown. What is so difficult for the layman to grasp is the fact that in most cases the patients themselves have no suspicion whatever of the internecine war raging in their unconscious. If we remember that there are many people who understand nothing at all about themselves, we shall be less surprised at the realization that there are also people who are utterly unaware of their actual conflicts.”

During Lent, we consider not merely what we profess about sin and struggle (our creeds and confessions) but we consider ourselves…

Renowned 20th century psychoanalyst Carl Jung tells the story of a patient who came to him for therapy. This patient was frustrated with his job, his work colleagues, and his relationships. Jung said, “Go home this week and spend each night alone and quiet. Come back and tell me what you experienced.”

A few weeks later, the client came back reporting that Jung’s method was unsuccessful. “I’m no happier, Dr. Jung,” he said.

“Tell him about your evenings alone,” Jung replied. The patient responded with a description of his evenings after work. “I came home, fixed myself a cup of tea, and spent my evenings reading and listening to some Mozart.”

“You missed the point,” Jung said. “I said you needed to be alone and quiet. No Mozart. No books. Spend time with you.”

“Why would I want to spend time with me?” the patient retorted.

Jung replied, “Exactly. And yet, that’s the very self you inflict on your colleagues and friends each day.”

Perhaps Jung had stumbled on to Thomas a’ Kempis, who wrote, ” “The inward Christian prefers the care of himself before all other cares. And he that diligently attends unto himself can easily keep silence concerning others. You will never be inwardly religious unless you pass over other men’s matters with silence, and look especially to yourself. If you attend wholly unto God and yourself, you will be but little moved with whatsoever you see abroad. Where are you when you are not with yourself? And when you have run over all, what have you then profited if you have neglected yourself? If you desire peace of mind and true unity of purpose, you must still put all things behind you, and look only upon yourself.”

I have to ask myself regularly, “Am I not THAT person, the person Jesus came to indict?”

After all, I am the religious professional. I have the degrees. I’ve been approved by the club. And much of the time, I think that I have it figured out.

Are you that person? Do you have it figured out, too? If so, Holy Week is for you. Will you follow Peter? Or will you follow Mary?

Like Peter, I wonder this: If I play my cards right, I might just have a chance to make a name for myself after Jesus is exposed as a fake.

Like Mary, I wonder this: Can I imagine any place other than at the side of my beloved Jesus, no matter the cost?

If I’m truthful, I am both. I will continue to delude myself into thinking I’m the chosen, the smartest, the holiest, the wisest.

God willing, this week will be full of holy humiliations, exposing my false self, revealing my insecurity, inviting me to an intimacy that God pursues apart from my petty attempts to manipulate it.

God willing, I might find myself empty handed at the end of this week, dependent and humbled. And I suspect that is just where God wants me. Empty of my false self. Empty of my delusions of grandeur, influence, success.

When I consider that Jesus, on that celebrated “Palm Sunday” many centuries ago, walked straight into hell, I shutter. That this Jesus called us to love our enemies, that he delivered us from evil by invading it…this puzzles me. It puzzles me because I’ve seen evil.

Evil isn’t some movie magic, it’s not some Poltergeist-production or Peritti-novel. It’s sinister and snake-like. When Jesus entered Jerusalem, he was entering a church office, a denominational building, a religious holy-ground. There were no spooks, just normal church-goers looking to live the holy life. Evil is often disguised in such a garb.

Evil often looks polite and deferential. Snakes parade around in holy garb. They compliment you first, then go in for the kill. They are incapable of self-reflection. Instead, they flaunt a false self covered in false humility. They can confess with the best. They can theologize with the greatest. They are defined by their enemies, because they’re always looking for a scapegoat. They are convincing, lawyerly in their arguments and accusations. They are sinister in their ability to exploit the weak.

Jesus identifies, however, with the weak and oppressed. And I’ve seen plenty of men and women like this over time. I think of the emotionally abused wife who faces the passive politeness of an apparently godly man, whose subtle and snakelike button-pushing ignites an eruption of anger, all of which he can conveniently deny. I think of the hard-working young man whose boss calls him in to his office to confront his behind-the-scenes power grab and his desire to take over. In his narcissistic rage, the boss sees the success of his young employee as a threat to his, and any success he cannot claim he must extinguish.

Palm Sunday is no abstract religious ceremony for the abused, betrayed, or indicted. It is a day of solidarity. And this week, of all weeks throughout the year, is your time if you’ve suffered in this way. Jesus walks the way of mockery and humiliation for you, on behalf of you, with you. You do not suffer alone. Now, more than ever, embrace a faith that sometimes feels counter-intuitive, filled with Pharisees and snakes, but see its center not in the Snake but in the Suffering Servant.

A thought on the eve of Palm Sunday and this week’s New Passover journey…

Brain Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat write, “This language of inheritance, forgiveness and rescue from one empire in order to be freed in another kingdom harks back to the exodus narrative. It was Israel who was rescued from the imperial captivity of Egypt. It was Israel who received the promised land as an inheritance. And it was to rebellious Israel that God revealed himself as a God of forgiveness (see Ex. 32:7-34:10). Now, says Paul, we experience an exodus liberation in Jesus. . . . In postmodern terms, this liberation is not in order to enslave us in yet another regime that would violently impose it ideology on us . . . the kingdom of the beloved Son is a kingdom won not through violence imposed on others but through violence imposed upon the Son.”